Jerash, Jordan: A city of goats and ghosts

The Bedouin boy smacks a stick on a
bleached rock and his small herd of goats, alarmed, leap forward a
few metres then begin again fossicking for weeds and tufts of grass
in this parched landscape.

As the late afternoon sun creates long
shadows and the blue sky turns a watery orange, you might wonder how
often – over thousands of years – this same scene has been acted
out here.

Across the dry riverbed, pale houses of
stone and cement creep up a hillside, but here the rolling land is
level in places where carts and carriages once rumbled, and all
around are the skeletal remains of a great city.

This is Jerash in northern Jordan, less
than an hour or so from the capital Amman. And because tourists to
the country are inevitably seduced by the drama of Petra to the south
with its temples carved into sandstone and Indiana Jones
associations, this remarkable ruined city can offer a quieter
experience by being less visited.

Yet Jerash, even for those who have
seen the Forum in Rome or
walked the ruined streets of Pompeii, is a breathtaking sight.

Stretching across low hills and off
into the far distance, at times the place can throng with visitors –
notably during the festival season where concerts are performed and
battle re-enactments take place -- but on a quiet day the dead city
still feels as if it breathing life.

Unlike Petra where earthquakes and
erosion have taken their toll over centuries and turned much of what
the Nabateans and Romans built to rubble, you can actually see and
feel this ancient city which lay largely buried until the early 19th
century.

Over there just past Hadrian's Gate at
the south entrance is the Hippodrome, an extended oval for horse and
chariot races some 250 metres down each long straight, and with
tiered seating. Further along is a
small avenue where the remains of the shop walls give you a sense of
what this thoroughfare must have been like when peopled by merchants,
customers, soldiers from the barracks opposite and the nobility on
their way to the temples further along.

Roman ruins are all over Jordan: in
Amman alone there is a remarkable amphitheatre and a sprawling
hilltop city. Across the most fertile and populated areas in the west
of this small country there are garrison outposts and temples,
structures which date back to pre-Biblical times and still
functioning amphitheatres.

But Jerash – known as Gerash by the
Greco-Romans who built it on the site of an even older civilisation
which dates back to the Bronze Age – is special.

The columns of the cardo maximus, the
main road from the wide forum, disappear to a vanishing point in the
distance and everywhere are avenues and enormous buildings like the
Temple of Artemis surrounded by Corinthian columns made of two-metre
high blocks mounted on top of each other.

If the scale of the buildings is
impressive – the enormous Nemphaeum isespecially stunning – then so is the small detail: blocks
stacked along the cardo maximus have intricately carved floral
patterns, the mosaic tiles at Saints Cosmas and Damian Church are in
surprisingly good condition, the Byzantine era “cathedral” (named
as such by the Americans who excavated it in 1929) has refined and
elegant lines, stones on the roads bear the indentations of a
thousand carts from an age long gone . . .

And if some parts, like the crumbling
Temple of Zeus, seem a clutter of fallen pillars and eroded blocks,
this just means they act as a counterpoint to those massive
structures still standing.

At day's end the young hawkers selling
postcards, books and their time barely make an effort as we walk back
through the empty forum.

The evening now belongs to the ghosts
of the past . . . and a young boy herding goats through the bones ofa city which once
commanded a pivotal position in the Roman Empire and then was buried
for hundreds of years by the dust of time.

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